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THEATER DESIGN
Installation Pix
This page contain graphics, and drawings, and photos from my theater design work with The Woodstock Players, and some notes about the productions and design.
*Click HERE to link to THE WOODSTOCK PLAYERS website*
September 2012
Endgame was written by Samuel Beckett in 1957 when the horrors of the WWII had given way to fears of a nuclear holocaust and people became obsessed with building bomb shelters. Endgame ponders the question what if you are unlucky enough to survive in your bomb shelter? The play is not so much a black comedy as it is a dark comedy.
The set: Beckett's sets are as spare and minimal as can be, which suits our budget of almost zero.
Carey Harrison as the blind tyrant Hamm, Mikhail Horowitz as his slave Clov.
I wanted Hamm to look like a down-at-heel King on a throne and Clov to look like a Chaplinesque butler, but who is slowly giving up on the formalities of his dress suit uniform.
Sarah Chodoff and David Smilow as Hamm's parents Nell and Nagg
I imaged them already in their shrouds. As the stage doesn't have a lower level and a trap, we need to have trash cans that could allow the actors an escape route + decided there was no reason to use 1950s style trash cans.
Above: Clov the slave and in "going away" costume; below the three-legged "Pomeranian." It is supposed to be made by Clov - I found this brilliant dog online - clip art perhaps, and we used that as the inspiration for the dog.
June/July 2012
Violet Snow as Violet Thorn the Hedgerow Specimen
Hedgerow Specimen was about a woman who abandons her family to travel the byways of America. She spends 27 years meditating on the wild plants that grow in the hedgerows with only, what she perceives to be, a snail for company. One night she witnesses a murder and is forced back to the word of people.
The SET for this play primarily consisted of live wild plants along the front of the stage and projected images at the back - For most of the play the images were of the earth and the sky / the weather.
The plants were grown over a period of 3 months while the photos for the slides were taken over exactly one year.
Above, Joe Bongiorno as Jimmy Weatherby, Violet Snow as Violet Thorn
Above: Violet Snow as Violet Thorn - Holly Graff as Anna Saunders
Richard Bennett as the Judge - costume referenced various other scenes and details in the play
Below, installation shot
January 2012
Below: Set Design sketch for American Buffalo
The completed set for the black box theater at CPA Rhinebeck, NY
The junk shop with back lighting
Ideas for costumes
Below, Carey Harrison as Donny Dubrow, Alex Bennett as Bobby, and Thomas Vernier as Teach
When we moved the production to the Kleinert/Jamers Art Center in Woodstock
we decided not to bring the flats but just have a more pared down symbolic set especially as it would be set against a white background
The center set piece installed in a white space - lighting created shadows on the walls
June 2011
Mikhail Horowitz as the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza
Set, Costumes & Properties design by Claire Lambe
The play which was also a play within a play within a play; a surreal fantasia - was set against a very simple set made up of benches with hooks on slats above for hanging clothing - it was both a back-stage (theater) dressing room and later a changing room in Auchwitz - white against the blacks. There were slides of Salvador Dali's paintings, rendered in black and white, projected onto a screen - the slide changed with each scene. The palette was primarily black, white and red.
Above scene: Salvador Dali at a party in Munich 1937
L to R: Mikhail Horowitz as a waiter/Baruch Spinoza/Idle Jack, Mick O'Brien as Salvador Dali/Adolf Hitler/King Rat/concentration camp prisoner, Violet Snow as Katya/Nazi Guard/Rat/concentration camp prisoner, Terri Mateer as a waiter/Nazi Guard/Rat/concentration camp prisoner.
Below: Kris Lundberg as Mary Jane Hammond from Ohio and as Dick Whittington
Above scene: the "Party" party - slide: Leda and the Swan, Salvador Dalí
Dalí makes the acquaintance of Mary Jane Hammond/Hartmann from Ohio
The party and the guests fade into the shadows as Dalí discovers what an American Jewish girl is doing in war-time Munich
Dalí unveils of the painting: Midget in a Catsuit reciting Spinoza
Below: The painting: Midget in a Catsuit Reciting Spinoza by Claire (Salvadore Dalí) Lambe
The script dictated that the painting had to dictate certain elements including a cat and a waterfall, both of which were problematic. Dalí didn't often use domestic animals so I decided to incorporate the cat into the landscape in a pose similar to the Panto cat we meet at the beginning of the play (who recites Spinoza). The cat's tongue is a path that becomes a scroll (possibly with Spinoza's words written on it) and then a waterfall that is representative of Mary Jane, the heroine's Pre-Raphaelite like hair. The rocks and boats in the water make up Mary Jane's face. The watermelon is referenced in the play when Hitler, at the tea-party, tries to get Mary Jane to taste some of Lenin's brain which he has acquired from the Moscow Brain Research Institute, and which he tells her tastes like watermelon. So I was thrilled to discover that Dalí had included a watermelon, from which mine is modelled, in one of his still life paintings.
Above: Sketch for costume for Hermann Goering - as the same actor doubles as the cook Mrs. Sausagemacher in the panto sections, I decided to make Goering's famous white suit a chef's suit and, as he is still a bit of a pantomime Nazi, felt his medals ought to be huge. On right is Richard Bennett as Goring.
Slide in backgroud: Cow by Savador Dalí
Below: Carey Harrison as Karl Schmitt - nazi ideologue. Slide: Three Spinxes
The dressing room benches become supports for the Nazi flags.
Preparing for afternoon tea with A. Hitler - Mary Jane has to wear a nice German dirndl dress. The rats' costume's are cinched at the waist with belts, and hats and arm bands added for the rats to become Hitler's personal body guards. Slide: Still Life Moving Fast
Above, Adolf says: "Shall I be Mother"
The pantomime in the play: Dick Whittington and his Marvelous Cat ends and the scene morphs back to wartime in Auchwitz.
Final Scene: Spinoza, under a curse to live forever, survives the Gas Chamber.
Slide: The Persistence of Memory gradually changes to full color during this scene.
June 2010
MAGUS was set in the garden of the palace of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II of Prague, where various characters were visiting including the magician (magus) Sir John Dee, a young William Shakespeare, Cervantes and a time-traveling Franz Kafka whose mission it is to rescue his sister Ottla from her delusions that she is married to the Emperor. Therefore the costumes required were from the 17th century and from the 20th century. The play was performed in two different venues so there were some changes to the set as one stage was a good deal larger than the other.
MODEL FOR THEATER SET: MAGUS - JUNE 2010 (Also models of actors for blocking).
As the play was set in the mind of a disturbed woman, or her distraught brother, I wanted the set to be like a drawing that is caught half way between becoming three dimensional. So the elements: the bench and the fawn especially were a combination of 2D and 3D.
THE MAIN SET at The CENTER for Performing Arts in Rhinebeck
The set in the Rhinebeck theater with George Conrad (left) who played Franz Kafka.
Below: image of Prague projected on cylorama as the Pre-set in the Rhinebeck production.
The left side of the set in the Byrdcliffe Theater - the set is much more pared down
Also in Byrdcliff but not Rhinebeck were the "watchers" - three faces that echoed the audience. In Rhinebeck we gave up the watchers in favor of having the cyclorama.
L to R: Wiley Gorn as Shakespeare, Peter Rae as Kafka, Trey Kay as Cervantes
Above: Brittany Sokolowski as Ottla Kafka
(This is a good view of the fawn - it is set against a back-lit reverse-painted screen which I happened to have in my garage.) Wiley Gorn as William Shakespeare and the arcangel Uriel, with Kris Lundberg as Jane Dee and Deborah Tiberio as Joan Kelly.
Carey Harrison as Sir John Dee (magus) and Phillip X Levine as Edward Kelly
Mark Kanter as Emperor Rudolf II and Peter Rae as Franz Kafka
Rudi Azank as William Shakespeare in MAGUS 2.
Below: KAFKA'S BUG MASK - left as a work in progress
I gave this mask as a keepsake to the actor, Peter Rae and so had to make a second, and I have to say, better, version when we reprised the play the following winter. One of these days I'll get it on here.
Click HERE to link with THE WOODSTOCK PLAYERS website